NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15 closer than many man-made satellites. NASA added that while the asteroid, designated 2012 DA14 has no chance of striking Earth, since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet.

“This is a record-setting close approach,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL in a video about the asteroid NASA put out this week.

As Han Li described it, the asteroid came into view of the camera at a range of 38 km, several seconds after its closest approach. At first the view of Toutatis was largely blocked by the solar array. But seconds later, when the craft was 90 km from Toutatis, the asteroid had moved out from behind the array, and imaging continued for several more seconds. Because the probe was departing from very close to the target in almost a straight line, all images were of nearly the same aspect.
Exactly how close Chang’e-2 came to Toutatis is still unclear. The first postencounter report placed the flyby range at 3.2 km, which was astonishingly—even recklessly—tight. Passing within a few kilometers of an asteroid only 2 to 3 km in diameter at a speed of 10 730 meters per second and following a 7-million-km journey could be described as either superb shooting or a near disaster. But if the 3.2-km figure is true, it would be another scientific bonanza. At that distance, the asteroid’s weak gravity could have measurably deflected the probe’s flight path, providing unique data on its mass. Together with imagery of its shape, this would have led to important clues about its density and composition. Han Li’s presentation did not confirm the flyby range.

The New York-based “light sculptor” is famous for designing huge, computer-driven LED art installations that cover entire walls of museums and other facilities around the country. But the Bay Lights, an array of individually programmed LEDs stretching across the entire Western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, makes Villareal’s other projects look tiny.

Over the last few months, workers from the Cailfornia Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which owns the bridge, have finished attaching 25,000 LEDs to the suspension cables on the bridge’s north-facing side. Now Villareal is testing the lights in preparation for an official “Grand Lighting” ceremony on March 5.

Facebook is still far and away the benemoth of all social networks, with almost 693 million active users (from its 903 million accounts) — 51 percent of the global Internet population — but Google and its services are catching up: Google Plus and YouTube are being used by 25 percent and 21 percent of the global Internet populace, respectively; Twitter is also used by 21 percent of the total, global Internet.

GitHub, a popular Web-based hosting service for software development projects, announced its internal search in “A Whole New Code Search,” posted on The GitHub blog on Jan. 23. Every time developers save changes to their source code on GitHub, the new search infrastructure automatically indexes the code, Tim Pease, a member of GitHub staff, wrote in the post. GitHub users can search for any string through public repositories and private repositories they have access to.

This can be useful for developers who are looking for open source libraries they can use in their projects, or even find code snippets to figure out how others solved a coding problem they are encountering. Users with multiple repositories can also use the search functionality to find specific lines of code in their own projects.

A few users discovered yet another way to use the search tool: finding files containing private encryption keys and source code with login credentials. Scarily enough, there were thousands of them.